Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @05:12PM
from the preserving-the-next-google-from-cradle-strangulation dept.

Nerdposeur points out that Cory Doctorow has a compelling piece in The Guardian today, arguing that network neutrality is not only crucial for the future of the Internet, but is what the ISPs owe to the public. He asks, "Does anybody else feel like waving a flag after reading this?" "If the phone companies had to negotiate for every pole, every sewer, every punch-down, every junction box, every road they get to tear up, they'd go broke. All the money in the world couldn't pay for the access they get for free every day... If they don't like it, let them get into another line of work — give them 60 days to get their wires out of our dirt and then sell the franchise to provide network services to a competitor who will promise to give us a solid digital future in exchange for our generosity."

There will always be small people who simply burn at the notion of someone else being talented and successful, especially someone who's not only talented and successful but who has made a large impact on the Internet culture that they enjoy, publishes earnest, well-written science fiction and runs what has been one of the most widely-enjoyed websites about technology and culture, while at the same time staying uniquely independent of commercial influence. Someone who also constantly goes out of his way to bring exposure to other talented, creative people with interesting points of view. That's what brings out the wrath of "Goldberg's Pants".

You young guys take note: When you hate someone for having what you do not, you bring curses upon your own head. The classical Greek dramatists pointed this out and it's no less true today.

And it always fascinates me that when encountering an opinion (usually but not always about a person) which conflicts with their own, many people will ascribe that opinion to jealousy no matter how well or how poorly reasoned the conflicting opinion is. Seems closely related somehow to those who enjoy accusing people of attempting to be 'trendy' for holding a contrarian viewpoint that is gaining popularity, without regard to the holders motivation.

It always fascinates me, the way grown men retreat to the "you're just jealous!" argument when encountering criticism of their idols.

Well, fine. If you want to criticise Mr. Doctorow then by all means do so. All I'd ask is to see some actual critical thinking there, rather than just arbitrary abuse. As someone already pointed out, it's difficult to see how some whose blog is widely read can be considered "irrelevant". Equally, the man seems to work rather hard in support of his chosen causes, so it's hard to make "blowhard" stick either.

On the other hand, I think I'd be slower to ascribe to jealousy that which could adequately be explained by trolling. Still, I don't think a word or two in Cory's defence was entirely uncalled for.

You young guys take note: when you love someone because you think he is better than you and insult those who criticise him, you're no better than the Mediaeval peasant who cheered as the Church burnt the heretic. Every post-Renaissance humanist pointed this out and it's no less true today.

Wait, wait, wait... stop right there. That's one assumption too many. Who says anyone here is a grown man? And if they happen to be so foolish, I challenge them to cite evidence... evidence sufficient to counter 99.97% of all/. posts ever.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. He may be a sensationalist blowhard, but that doesn't mean he'll never touch on a real issue. (Actually, it means he's likely to hit many, if only for attention. Ignore him, but don't disregard a real issue just because the loudest supporter is a nutcase.) Cory may be full of smoke, but where there's smoke there is a fire.

If you read TFA:"Telus, a Canadian telcom that blocked access to a site established by its striking workers where they were airing their grievances."

The RIAA would love to make iTunes less popular to force people to their own services.Hulu would love the chance to do this to YouTube. (Forget who makes $ off of celebrity jeopardy, the big prize is stopping amateur movie makers from developing enough of a following to ever pose a credible threat.)

Existing ISPs would love to make it harder to find competitors.

Sweetheart deals where big $ companies paid for upstarts to be unable to compete would be all over. To call that paranoia is to ignore history. (Including a fair amount of recent history) Imagine if before and during an RIAA style sue 'em all, don't bother to only sue guilty people style incident, the victims were unable to find legal assistance.

"Common Carrier" status was established, trading protections to Telcos in exchange for a lack of censoring for one reason, the blackmail capacity the phone companies were sitting on was a racket that could not only crush any other company it chose, it could be used against the country itself. Imagine the economic damage if just one major phone company decided to shut off for the day... The telcos could easily force themselves into power, and given the # of great deals given to them, it's uncertain whether they're being constantly appeased to prevent this, or if it has already happened and this is them giving themselves presents.

Judgments like this one contain information about the one giving them and not the topic discussed.

Thank you for offering an excellent example of how empty/rich this kind of language is:

Parsing the data:the author is mystified (and maybe irritated)author thinks CD is irrelevant (to what? presuming to author's criteria of relevance of people)and a blowhard (??)CD has a website (a useful fact!)and the author thinks it's a stupid one (according to author's criteria? compared to what? can websites be stupid?)

He asks, "Does anybody else feel like waving a flag after reading this?"

No. I feel like marching in protest. That didn't make me feel more patriotic. It made me feel more willing to express my frustration with the telcos.

Unless he meant a white flag. In which case I have to say, definitely no. That did not make me want to surrender. Of course, I'm not a telco -- maybe reading that would make them want to surrender -- price-gouging surrender monkeys that they are.

He asks, "Does anybody else feel like waving a flag after reading this?"

No. I feel like marching in protest. That didn't make me feel more patriotic. It made me feel more willing to express my frustration with the telcos

Uhh... Have you ever been to a protest?

I, for one, have waved the red flag [wikipedia.org] in several protests and would be willing to do so for this too, I guess. I have also seen a black flag [wikipedia.org] waved in some protests and am sure that it would fit in those too.

Not that there is an issue about net neutrality where I live. Government regulates companies enough that ISPs couldn't threat net neutrality without putting a lot of effort into making it very clear what it's all about and in such case the competition would take care

What competitive free market? In my neighborhood, there are two options for consumer broadband, just like everyone's, across the nation. Those options increase if you're willing to pay $300.00 for a T1, but the cable/telco duopolies throughout the US prohibit a truly competitive environment.

Some parts of the country don't even have 2 options. The company I work for, we do tech support for multiple cable companies across the U.S. Some areas, speeds are as low as 256kbps down/128kbps, and that's all that's available. No DSL.

You think that's bad? Some of us have to use string and cans you insensitive clod!

In all seriousness though, some areas don't have real broadband at all, besides satellite. And in some of those areas the phone lines are so old and degraded they max out at around 24kbps down. (And of course, we can go really extreme and bring up the places that don't have any communication lines at all, but then those places usually don't have any other modern amenities either so they really don't count.) But sadly, the max 24kbps down is more widespread than you might think. In fact, where I call "home" right now (about 20 minutes from Columbus OH) up until very recently that was precisely the case. There's still no DSL or cable available, but someone was nice enough to set up a short-range (signal reaches up to about 3 miles or so) wireless ISP that is passably good.

Anywhere with a large enough population density. The US people's problem is that their country is mostly empty.

If they lived in reasonable cities where services could be easily centralised, this would work. But post-ww2, the big thing was the suburbs, going by car everywhere, spreading the population all over the place...And it doesn't even start to take the truly rural population into account.

So now they cannot pull cable to every home (not to mention that of course the telcos certainly don't want to be in

Well, he might live in Japan, but I live in Bulgaria (pop. density 68.9/km2, vs 31/km2 for USA) and I have 10 MBit connection for about 20 USD, while even in the most desolate inhabited area you can get at least DSL connection.

We have 1/7 of the nominal GDP per capita, so don't tell me it's just Japan. It's just everyone besides USA, and the faster you accept that, the faster you'll be able to fight for your rights.

And other assorted Fairy Tales by Slashdotter brasselv, with an intro by Ayn Rand.

A free market is not possible anywhere at any time. Some markets are free enough to render this distinction not terribly important for the most part, but the telecom/ISP market is almost the polar opposite of those relatively free markets in this regard.

Where do you live where it is possible to just "switch" to a different ISP?

Everyone I have lived (save one place) has only had one option for high speed internet. One cable company which was granted a sanctioned monopoly to service the area. If you didn't like the way they did business your options were limited. DSL for a majority of locations is not nearly as fast as cable- if you live close enough to the service station at all. If the only other option is dialup and you are protesting slow speeds on non-a

As a fellow Brit, I wish it was our superior wit. In this case however, I think it is simply the fact you bothered to read and understand the post before responding to it.

I've been getting a depressing vibe from Slashdot lately, all the indignant yet unconsidered posts etc are making it clear that we're as a group no better than the ignorant people on the other side of the fence.

The "competitive, free market" is code for siphoning wealth from the productive middle and working classes and giving it to anti-national corporations who are openly hostile to the very notion of Democracy.

It's a fiction that's been created by (guess who?) the corporate interests that are the only ones to benefit from the kind of lawless laissez faire we've been subjected to. They

I think many people miss the real danger here. Yes, if your own ISP is doing stuff you don't like (filtering, throttling, prioritising, spoofing, whatever) then you can change them -- in a fair market, at least. So that sort of thing generally won't be in their interests.

But what if it's not your ISP? What if it's a backbone provider, or some other middleman?

How about the opposite... how anout as municipalities, we band together and start charging them rent on our ditches and land that they are running the cable through. They want to screw us on the received end then we will screw then on the intake valve. If we stand firm enough, the fear of being charged billions to use their own lines will put the fear of some sort of ancient evil from beyond the stars into them.

Municipalities do charge them. We just charge too little, and don't ask for much service in return. The last time my city "negotiated" with the cable company, I don't recall it being big news, and I certainly don't recall there being much public debate over what the terms should be.

For me, it's 8 years until the current contract is up. And yes, I'm going to make a stink.

Instead, make infrastructure part of building codes and get community builders mandated to run decent fiber (not FiOS) drops to each residence.

Doctorow makes a great point about the abuse and monopolistic attitude that telcos have had for decades-- all bought and paid for at the Legislative Market. These stinking thieves do indeed put out capital for infrastructure, but they're only beholden to shareholders, not ratepayers in their captive markets.

Thats a nice idea in principle, but it won't happen. Currently few people are buying houses and property because of the media-led housing scare. Because of this scare, some people have simply stopped making house payments leading to foreclosure of many homes, this leads to banks being tight with money, this leads to few people buying houses.

Making places even more expensive is not the answer. Even with many homes and properties being sold at a loss there are still relatively few buyers. By mandating tri

And personally, I believe the 'free market' is a sham for 'do what I want cause I got the gold'. Utilities were granted many qualities in exchange for a monopoly. Now that monopoly has turned against us, almost uniformly.

And the monopoly the utilities have was in every case granted by the state. The free market doesn't enter into it. Arguably, some things are naturally best managed by monopolies. Online services, outside of maybe - and it's a stretch - the cables that carry them, are not best served by a monopoly. Every time someone argues that the free market is responsible for monopoly misbehavior, my blood pressure goes up ten points. Free markets imply competition, which is distinctly lacking in the telco context thanks to government intervention.

Monopolies inevitably become excessive. Free markets are just another buzzword for leave me alone, I want to suck as much out of something as I can without regulation or pesky rules to get in my way.

The states comprised 47 different authorities that the monopolies had to deal with, so they lobbied moving things to a federal level so they only had one jurisdiction to bribe. Now the state utility authorities are almost toothless when it comes to regulating the re-formed giants that are Verizon, Quest, AT&T, etc.

These guys are very interested in TOTAL domination of their markets and they know they have the cost barrier points in their favor, signed-sealed-and-delivered by the FCC and the Congress. After all, they PAID FOR IT. Go ahead, check out the records of how much the utilities have spent on lobbying and campaign contributions (yes, legal bribes).

Funny, I don't remember my power company becoming excessive at any point. I remember prices going down once...

You see, many utilities are best served by local monopolies. If you don't like it, you're welcome to start your own power company... but don't look to me for help when you go bankrupt before you have customers.

Now, if internet service were run as a utility, and a minimum connection speed were mandated, then prices wouldn't be so bad, and it wouldn't matter so much if there were only one choice.

The monopolies causing problems in this discussion are all government-granted monopolies. That seems to be the root cause of this problem. Your argument that "government corruption caused this problem, so let's add more government - surely it won't become corrupt this time" seems a bit weak.

While it made sense at one time to allow the phone company to own the lines, since they were taking a huge capital risk on this dubious "telephone" idea (heck, even if you had one, who would you call?), these days owne

How about the opposite... how anout as municipalities, we band together and start charging them rent...

If government stood for the general population rather than for businesses, we wouldn't have the DMCA, eternal copyright, overly lax banking regulation, or the inability to erase consumer credit card debt via bankruptcy court.

So as nice as your idea sounds, I'm afraid it's pretty much just fantasy.

Or -- and this is just me here -- we could try encouraging a way of doing business that *doesn't* screw *anybody.* The basis of trade is mutual profit, as in, both parties get more out of the trade than they lost. Each has what the other wants. Quid pro quo.

People are too ready to tear others down to get what they want. It's time to adopt the mindset of building each other up: the businesses and the customers alike. Things work better that way.

Ridiculously high upfront cost, is a waste of resources to make multiple sets of them for each competitor, internet cables, like roads, seem like the perfect thing to have under government control. We can have private companies competing for the services they can provide over these lines.

because we would still be using telegraph if we had to rely on the government to improve communications infrastructure

What about

The ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) created by ARPA of the United States Department of Defense during the Cold War, was the world's first operational packet switching network, and the predecessor of the global Internet.

Packet switching, now the dominant basis for both data and voice communication worldwide, was a new and important concept in data communications. Previously, data communication was based on the idea of circuit switching, as in the old typical telephone circuit, w

Because the government is terrible at managing things, has no competition, and little oversight.

Not true, no matter how much it's the cornerstone of libertarian thinking. It's just that the stuff that the government does manage really well hardly ever gets noticed. Examples include municipal water systems, fire fighting and prevention, traffic controls, and park systems. Municipal power companies also tend to do at least as well as their private competitors in the next town or city over in terms of providing cheap and efficient service to their customers.

As a Canadian with a Crown Corporation ISP it never ceases to amaze me how "libertarians" in the US with "open markets" receive so much less service and pay so much more for it, and rail against the type of service I have because "it never works".

I don't think I've ever heard an argument that was serious for the other side of this issue. Am I just ignorant? Or is this a non-issue that people like to discuss?

Regardless, censorship is a scary thing. Fortunately, the internet is probably bigger than most blacklist-based censorship attempts, and I don't think we're in such a bad position that people would tolerate anything more restrictive (whitelists or graylists). The great firewall of china is obviously the exception to this.

Actually, it is not. Speaking as somebody that has been to China and seen the poorest parts, and the most affluent areas, I can assure you, that you are wrong.

The average Chinese person does not understand what the "Great Firewall" is. Those that do understand (which is a small percentage of the population), also know the ways around it. The firewall itself is largely ineffective against anybody with a reasonable level of skill. Personally, I think the firewall was created to maintain an image.

What is more effective, and instills more fear, are the government workers that are actively looking for undesirable (local) content and then "censoring" it. Of course, China's censorship can get pretty hands on.

Even with such hands on censorship being performed, the people are fighting back making sure the information is getting around. The milk contamination is a great example. Not only were people still able to get their hands on foreign articles, but there was movement inside the country to disseminate the information and confront the government. It took time, and you most likely did not hear much in the foreign news.

The Chinese people are not willing to "tolerate anything". If anything, the tolerance you speak of is just ignorance. Those that understand they are being censored, are by no means taking it lightly.

From my experience, for every regulation or law in China, there are 10 different ways to get around it. 100 ways if it involves bribes.

"I don't think I've ever heard an argument that was serious for the other side of this issue."

Over here in the states, the counter arguments generally run something like, "Good day, Senator So-and-so. Here's a pile of cash the size of Rhode Island. We would encourage you to let ISPs run roughshod over consumers. Sound good?"

It's a shame that he's turning into a loudmouthed pundit rather than an author I'd care to read.

I drove down the highway today and was stuck in traffic for a long while. There were lots of cars zipping in and out, but the main problem was a group of long-haul trucks taking up a mile of roadway. The amount of road we have is finite, so the addition of these large trucks is fine for a few, but once you start getting more than a handful of trucks on the road, all traffic is affect.

But Net Neutrality is a tough issue. Yes, clearly, as users we want as unfettered a line as possible. However, the ISP also needs to balance the needs of all the users against the needs of certain special users.

If it weren't for some users flooding the network with massive filesharing packets, this would all be a non-issue. Actually, for most users it still is since most users are not affected at all by bandwidth strangling.

the ISP also needs to balance the needs of all the users against the needs of certain special users.

As youtube and hulu and other online distribution sites like itunes or steam or the playstation store get more and more popular, "all of the users" need more bandwidth. Either that, or more and more users become "special".

That's not what net neutrality is about. That's QoS or usage tiers. What net neutrality is about is making sure that toll road owners are not charging more for trucks carrying company A's stuff than trucks driving company B's stuff. ISPs want to be able to degrade performance from certain internet services, such as Skype and Hulu, in order to "encourage" you to use their own services. That is, unless those services pay your ISP an extortion fee.

In other word, net neutrality is about not discriminating against the source of the traffic. It says nothing about discriminating based on the type of traffic and amount. Comcast should not arbitrarily degrade my Skype traffic because they prefer me to use their VOIP service and Skype refuses to pay them a kickback. I should be able to choose how I use my connection, so long as I am not infringing upon other users.

If it weren't for some users flooding the network with massive filesharing packets, this would all be a non-issue. Actually, for most users it still is since most users are not affected at all by bandwidth strangling.

So hulu, youtube, and itunes (not to mention spam) are going to go away if filesharing is turned off on the entire Internet? Riiiight.

At the same token, if government (or corporations for that matter) fail to provide for more than a single lane of traffic, then there are going to be traffic jams. However, if the road is wide and broad, then the line of long haul truckers are no longer an issue. Likewise, if there is fiber to every home in the US, suddenly the packet hogs are no longer an issue.

The US has continuously fallen behind [slashdot.org] in broadband rankings, as corporations wallow in their greed [nytimes.com]. The fact is, government (as Cory starts to all

If this is about phone companies, then I think I'd rather just end the monopoly they enjoy anyway. Asking a committee or government to decide what forms of Internet access are equal to others (and thus require neutrality) is just asking for trouble.

(1) If you treat Cory Doctorow like he's relevant, then he will believe he is.
(2) Yes, it is important to preserve NetNeutrality, but I'm surprised anyone is writing up an article so late in the game.
(3) "Finally, there's the question of metered billing for ISP customers." This has nothing to do with net neutrality. I don't see what the problem is. He's arguing that people don't know how much internet they're going to use. But, please don't try to fool us into thinking that we have *no idea* how much internet we use. The only way you're going to end up in the top 2% is if you're downloading massive quantities of information (not webpages!) Metered access to the internet isn't much different than cell-phone minutes. (Oh! We have NO IDEA if we're going to use 10,000 minutes a month, or 50 minutes a month - therefore telecoms can't charge us by the minute!) How absurd. I'd be pretty unhappy if they started changing a lot per MB, but in the real-world, I don't see this being much of a problem at all unless you're uploading/downloading Gigs of data. And, isn't this how companies pay for internet service anyway? A company's internet usage will vary significantly based on factors like "number of employees". So, they simply charge by bandwidth.

(Oh! We have NO IDEA if we're going to use 10,000 minutes a month, or 50 minutes a month - therefore telecoms can't charge us by the minute!) You haven't met my wife, have you? She has been known to exceed her 1500 minute per month allotment and run up hundreds of dollars worth of airtime at $0.30/minute. The only safe plan for her would be the 43,200 minutes per month plan.

Paying $/Gig is all well and good, but that usually isn't what tiered pricing is. Tiered pricing usually involves a minimum price that's unreasonably high for the amount of data included, and then very expensive chunks of overage. (Just like old cellphone plans, or the texting plans that are widely being objected to). Now if someone offered me unfiltered, unfettered, (meaning I can serve whatever the hell I want, for example) internet access, at 20/20 or better speed, with static IP, for $2/Gigabyte tran

Tiered pricing usually involves a minimum price that's unreasonably high for the amount of data included

THAT is a problem that arises when there is no competition. I absolutely believe we MUST move away from unlimited. It's insanity to keep it.

Businesses pay for their bandwidth in tiered pricing packages sometimes combined with metered billing. The difference is, there is PLENTY of competition. Colo A charges 180$ per Mb/s (symmetrical) on their bottom tier which is up to 10 Mb/s. Colo B charges 75$ pe

"(Oh! We have NO IDEA if we're going to use 10,000 minutes a month, or 50 minutes a month - therefore telecoms can't charge us by the minute!) How absurd."

Almost everybody understands the concept of a minute and how long it feels like. If they use 100 minutes in a given day, they know it's not 15 minutes and they know it's not 500 minutes, even if they didn't time themselves. But most internet users don't have any idea of what it means to download a gigabyte or 100 gigabytes, if they even know what a giga

I don't know how many games I'm going to download over XBox Live, PSN, and Steam (and yes, I use all three) in a given month, and I don't know how many hours of Hulu I'm going to watch in a given month. I also used to use an MSDN account quite extensively. So no, I don't know how much internet I'm going to be using. The ISP doesn't really give me a convenient way to find out, either (since they'd rather hit me with overage fees).

My problem with tiers is that they're inevitably structured so that its inconvenient or impossible to use my connection for entertainment without hitting their overage fees. In other words, the point of the tiers always seems to be to prevent or discourage me from using services that compete with the cable companies', and that justifiably pisses me off.

I dislike Cory. I hate Creative Commons. I detest copyright, public-use rights, public utilities, and anything related to non-market forces for real property. Intellectual property is a dying term, long dead in my dictionary (note, I am a writer and I get paid to write).

I want to see municipal allowances for duopolies destroyed. Let residents who own property rent it to whoever wants to take the time to rent it. Let competing companies, even at the local level, battle for access to the last mile. They'll get good international uplinks, they'll battle each other on service and price and performance.

Today, we have public funding across the board, regulations that restrict competition, and people afraid of seeing 500 internet lines over their house (note, they won't).

Cory should roll over and retire. He's a geek's dream, and a capitalist's nightmare. Capitalism will save the web, net neutrality won't.

And yet, he continues to be a successful writer and sought after futurist.

People pay money for his stuff. There's a market for Cory's works and thoughts. He's good at making it happen.

I'd say Cory is a capitalist's vindication -- he positions his stuff to build wealth from it, and doesn't rely on government intervention to do it. He uses his own methods and madness, and it works in the market he plays in.

Today, we have public funding across the board, regulations that restrict competition, and people afraid of seeing 500 internet lines over their house (note, they won't).

That's right, they'll see one or none. Because no one is going to build out the infrastructure if they can't be assured they'll have a near-captive market.

It's the natural barriers to entry that make monopolies in telecom exist. It's the regulation of monopolies in telecom that should prevent those monopolies from abusing their position.

Competition is not the natural consequence on unregulated markets. Monopolies are the natural consequence of unregulated markets, since there is no such thing as an ideal free market.

Even the Austrian school of economic theory recognizes the need for intervention to keep monopolies from limiting the efficient allocation of resources, and that monopolies are the natural result of largely imperfect markets (like this one, where the huge *natural* barrier to entry makes it so).

Of course, you may be perfectly fine with serial monopoly, but in that case you must be unfamiliar with the sunk costs involved in serial monopolies, which represent inefficient allocation of resources.

We've been over this before, I'm just not sure if you recall the discussion.

Even the Austrian school of economic theory recognizes the need for intervention to keep monopolies from limiting the efficient allocation of resources, and that monopolies are the natural result of largely imperfect markets (like this one, where the huge *natural* barrier to entry makes it so).

is, I'm pretty sure, flat-out wrong. According to the Austrians true monopolies only arise if government mandated or protected. Thus intervention in the marketplace, according to them, by the government is what gives rise to monopolies, not that intervention must stop them.

Additionally,

Monopolies are the natural consequence of unregulated markets, since there is no such thing as an ideal free market.

is a non sequitur; the conclusion is not following from the premise in any way I can see.

"give them 60 days to get their wires out of our dirt and then sell the franchise to provide network services to a competitor who will promise to give us a solid digital future in exchange for our generosity."

What generosity? The city owns the land they're using, not you.

In exchange for the huge capital outlay of installing the infrastructure, the city gives them certain rights. It's a win-win.

Let's see if I can summarize the gist of most Slashdot articles recently:

- Screw any internet provider that wants to cap any users or charge a lot more for heavy users.- Screw any internet provider that wants to give more weight to some traffic over others.- Give me my P2P

It's entirely possible to provide three. The actual triangle is "Cheap, fast, good. Pick two." In this case, I'd rather see "good" as a given, and let people decide between "fast" and "cheap". That way, the average consumer would have a cheap connection that's open and has no caps, but might be a little slow. Then if you want to use BitTorrent on that connection, it works, but it's slow. If you want 20Mbps speeds, to increase your BitTorrent performance, or enable faster NetFlix downloads, or upload family movies faster, or whatever, you pay extra.

This isn't about throttling types of traffic, this is about throttling based on the source of the traffic. To copy an analogy from up above, net neutrality isn't about tollbooths charging more for trucks than cars; this is about charging more for trucks owned by Staples than trucks owned by Office Max.

Who owns the city? Last time I checked I thought the idea was the public owned everything and the city was the "property manager" supposedly operating in our best interests.

Sorry, but you make it sound like it is operating in an ideal fashion with no corruption or nepotism involved at any level.

In exchange for the huge capital outlay of installing the infrastructure, the city gives them certain rights. It's a win-win.

A win for the city officials. A win for the company. A big loss for the citizens.

There is not enough competition, and that is a problem. It's not like gas, electric, or water. I'm tired of people equating the two, since the Internet is far different than other utility. It *has* become as important the other utilities, but it is not the same.

- Screw any internet provider that wants to cap any users or charge a lot more for heavy users.

I share your sentiment. This is a stupid and shortsighted mentality. Unlimited must be removed for any sanity to be introduced back into the system. I am vehemently opposed to caps, but I am in favor of a different pricing model that includes throttling once you have reached your agreed upon "cap". Basically, I want to be charged at home the same way I am charged at my data center for bandwidth. There is no technical reason why it cannot be accomplished, it's all just opposition from the MBA's and POS executives.

- Screw any internet provider that wants to give more weight to some traffic over others.

What are we talking about here? QoS based on traffic type or traffic source?

QoS is a technical solution that can work well when implemented end-to-end. Nothing sinister about it. Voice traffic, Real time gaming traffic, etc. need to get there first before somebody's FTP and torrent traffic. Most people don't have a problem with that.

Where is gets very concerning is when companies "penalize" traffic because it directly competes with one of their own products and services. The Internet, as a utility, has become to important to be malevolently twisted in such a damaging way.

Local telephone companies are not degrading, stopping, or interfering with your communications if it interferes with their business, or the business of their affiliates. Like another poster stated, it would be like being put on hold when calling Pizza Hut with a message saying, "Press 1 to be connected to Domino's our preferred pizza partner". I paraphrased, but I think you get the point.

The Internet is special, in that it has an unprecedented amount of information concerning every little tidbit of communication passing through it. It can certainly be abused, and there are people drooling to do so.

I fully support the idea of net neutrality. ISP's should stick to ONLY providing the Internet. Nothing more allowed by law. Traffic shaping based on the source of the traffic, or it's content should be disallowed by law in the strongest language possible with very serious consequences. In return, the ISP's get blanket immunity for all traffic passing through their networks.

This whole circus where bandwidth "abuse", P2P, and Piracy are being mixed up with the Net Neutrality debate is just bullshit designed to distract us and create inflammatory environments in which intelligent dialogue becomes impossible. Which is what Big Media and some the ISP's want.

Net Neutrality is about ONE THING ONLY. Making sure the source and content of a communication is never used to give preferential/detrimental treatment based on financial motivations. That's it. It's in our best interests as a society, all societies, to make it happen as quick as possible.

In 1994 I worked for a company setting up an ISP. We called in the phone company to order 50 lines. (Dial up was all there was then ). The company was not happy, especially that we were ordering business lines, with a low cost, 15 cents for each outgoing call but no cost for incoming calls .

As an ISP we only had incoming calls. They had no choice, since phone systems had to sell lines to anyone ( oh the joys of regulation! ). Had the phone version of net neutrality not been in place, the phone companies would have throttled or taken over the internet - and we would not have the open net we have now.

Take filtering: by allowing ISPs to silently block access to sites that displease them..

Does anyone know of an ISP that is actually blocking a competitor's site?

ISPs would also like to be able to arbitrarily slow or degrade our network connections depending on what we're doing and with whom. In the classic "traffic shaping" scenario

Careful! Some QoS is good! I *want* my ISP to QoS VoIP traffic. If they QoS their internal VoIP traffic, but not traffic that goes outside their network, it that their fault? Will stupid laws prevent them from providing quality VoIP services within their network? What if the ISP routes VoIP traffic to special links? Is this a form of QoS that violates the spirit of the Internet?

Finally, there's the question of metered billing for ISP customers.

I think it is unfair for me to have to pay more for my bursty usage just because some guy wants to torrent 24/7. If you want more expensive Internet service, then by all means, pass a law that prevents capping. The funny thing is that a law like that will just help the big telcoms that have plenty of peering. The smaller, local ISP's will die because they won't be able to support the costs of their transit links.

The truest form of "'Net neutrality" is for We the People to force the telcos - at gunpoint if necessary - to sell us back the "wires" and shared public infrastructure that they built for us. Cory seems to have *almost* identified the problem, but not quite, and so doesn't identify the correct solution.

The telecom industry should have been nothing more than contractors to the public interest, just as road construction crews are contractors; we don't allow road crews to retain ownership of the asphalt they lay down, and neither should we have allowed AT&T and its imitators to own the telegraph wires and everything else that has followed. We should have paid them ONCE for that work, and then perhaps kept them on as maintainers of that network, but at no point should they have been allowed to own the wires. That is where we screwed-up. Those wires belong to all of us, just as do the roads and the "airwaves" and the air we breathe. Those are all things shared by everyone that lend themselves perfectly to a bit of socialism... in this case public or (*gasp!*) "state" ownership.

The result of public ownership of the wires would be the inability of the telcos to blackmail us - or each other - for right of access. We the People would be in the driver's seat; if we didn't like the antics of one or more telcos, we could use our ownership of the wires to force them to shape up or ship out.

In Canada, back in the good ol' socialist days of a Single Phone Company, if Bell did something greedy and stupid, all you had to do was call up the CRTC, (the Canadian Radio & Television Commission) and lodge a complaint. I'd done it a couple of time, and the problems magically vanished. That was back when I didn't mind paying taxes quite so much, because my government was actually doing something useful.

Then the Public Relations people for some greedy corporate start-up told everybody that a single phone system wasn't competitive and that we were in danger of all becoming communists or some stupid air-head shit, and the idiot masses were manipulated into pressing for Bell's system to be opened up to the glories of competition. And because people are fucking stupid in large numbers, easily swayed by emotional messages, I now have several awful phone services to choose from all of which charge too much and calling the CRTC no longer holds the kind of wonderful powers it once did.

Overarching governmental powers don't fit well for every situation, and in some cases they are downright bad. But when it comes to vital systems, like communications and medical care, I want a really big hammer to smash greedy, lazy, stupid assholes with. I USED to have that big hammer AND an efficient, affordable phone system, and now I don't. So thank-you very much for making my life that much more crappy with your stupid social experiment which I told you was going to fail back when you first jumped on the bandwagon in the heady, wide-eyed days of your first year at some ass-hat university where your young minds were molded. You know who you are.

I understand the sentiment, but the correct answer is "I will never vote for any politician who puts corporate interest ahead of the welfare of citizens and neither should you."

This covers many Democrats and all Republicans. Unfortunately, it also seems to cover most Libertarians.

Corporations are the enemy of Democracy. Not because it's a necessary part of doing business, but because they've have chosen that path.

The only solution is to take all private money out of the election process. There needs to be iron-clad, enforced limitations on campaign finance, with a Justice Department squad whose only job is to make sure that a brand new set of campaign finance laws are enforced without exception.

The notion (put forth by corporatist SCOTUS judges) that MONEY=SPEECH has been the single most destructive opinion put forth by the Supreme Court of the United States in our history. We will never again have fair elections, accountable office-holders or a strong middle class until we have reduced the influence of money in our political system.

See that the Dems got the $10k and the $95K plus donation lead categories in even the 2006 cycle. IIn 2008, they smoked it by business.
Democrats got paid by business more than the Republicans. The MSM likes to say the Republicans are bought off more but it is not supported by the facts.

And prior to that the Repubs got more. Maybe business saw that there wasn't a chance in hell McCain/Palin was going to win, and wanted to put there money where it was more effective (which is indicative of the problem, just

Corporations are simply large businesses, structured that way for better profit and efficiency. While they can be powerful, they're no more an "enemy of democracy" than other large entities, including our own elected government. Furthermore, I'd like to see you live without corporate products for awhile. Come back and tell me what life is like for you when you can no longer buy cars from Toyota, computers from Apple, burgers from McDonalds, fly on planes from Boeing

Corporations are simply large businesses, structured that way for better profit and efficiency. While they can be powerful, they're no more an "enemy of democracy" than other large entities, including our own elected government. Furthermore, I'd like to see you live without corporate products for awhile. Come back and tell me what life is like for you when you can no longer buy cars from Toyota, computers from Apple, burgers from McDonalds, fly on planes from Boeing, or take antibiotics from Merck. You get back to us on what it was like to try and build your own cars, grow all your own food, and make your own clothing.

*Huge* corporations *are not* simply large businesses. They don't simply have just a bit more power, they are huge collections of money and huge collections of power, so huge as they change the gravity of the power of the country.

The governmental structure of the U.S. was just not intended to deal with huge pockets of power. U.S. society has a huge blind spot in regards to this, but the writers of the constitution did not. They saw the damage that was caused by the East India company and while they believed that corporations could be a positive force as long as they were limited. They believed in giving them *limited* charters (ones that actually expired!) and not allowing them to own other corporations or land that wasn't related directly to their businesses. That was all chucked in the mid-1800s because the rich wanted to get richer.

Corporations are useful for big tasks, but I don't think that any the tasks you listed here couldn't be done by a small or medium size businesses. With the Internet and the modern tech available to us there are damn few jobs that I know that couldn't be done by a small business, and just about anyone and be an international player. Sorry... I doubt the modern corporation is necessary to maintain life as we know it.

We need more private money in elections. We should be able to give whatever amount we damn well please to candidates and causes as long as a donor's list is publicly available.

What's that supposed to achieve? I can already see a lot of publicly available information about who donated what to whom, and when that same whom turns around and bends the rules or entirely breaks them in order to benefit the who, no one does anything about it. We already have huge amounts of very open corruption. I don't see why we want, as you say, more.